People who know me are generally aware of my aversion to ironing. It is very near top of my list of tedious activities, a close contestant to watching paint dry.
And now I've discovered Facebook, and it only makes me appreciate Multiply more.
I won't attempt a detailed comparison, first because I haven't studied all the ins and outs of Facebook, and second because I think they are not actually trying to serve the same purposes. FB is very clearly for networking only (social or professional) whereas on Multiply there's scope for much much more.
But my first reaction to FB is: it feels like I've stumbled into a children's party, and I'm surprised to discover that there is actually something that seems too childish to me - I mean, I speak as someone who plays Ludo with her husband some evenings!
And I hate it when computers take true facts, digest them and churn out something completely untrue (and yes, it's not the computer's fault - it's only doing what some human being told it to do). For instance, there are at the moment four people with whom I have signed up as "friends" on FB (that's the FB equivalent to "contacts" here on Multiply) so when I log on I get a message at the top of my screen saying: You have 4 friends. Which is complete rubbish. The people I've linked up with there may or may not be people I count as friends, and I'm not going to try counting those out there whom I do count as friends who have so far had the sense not to sign up with FB...
And here's one of the childish things there: when you link up with someone a message appears on your screen for all your contacts to see, saying: Meirav and X are now friends. Doesn't it sound like kids at school? Oh no, mummy, Jane's not my best friend anymore, from today I'm friends with Jenny...
Another thing that narks me is this: for each contact on FB you have the option of saying where you know them from. I've got contacts there whom I know from the BMJA, so I tried ticking the appropriate box and saying BMJA. The result was a message on the screen that says something like: Meirav and X were members of the BMJA. Which makes it sound like we are no longer members of the BMJA, right? So I tried editing, and discovered that you can put dates in, to say it was from a certain year to a certain year, and under "to" you can enter "present" - but it will only allow you to do that if you enter a start year, so I had to think, and well, okay, I started going to BMJA conferences in 1999 so I entered 1999 as the start year. Which means now it says we "have been members" instead of "were members" - an improvement, certainly, but it now says: Meirav and X have been members of the BMJA since 1999, which of course is nonsense - just because I started in that year, it doesn't mean that everyone else I know from that context also did.
<sigh> Well, what's a blog page for if not for venting one's feelings... (And you can't do that so easily on FB - much easier to give someone a fish for their virtual aquarium, or "poke" someone - yuk...)
but how to get people over to multiply? 